/ 


The  Torpedo  under 
the  Ark 


"Ibsen  and  Women" 

by- 

Ellen  Key 

Authorized  translation  from  the 
Swedish  by 

MamahBoutonBorthwick 


The  Ralph  Fletcher  Seymour  Co. 

FINE  ARTS  BUILDING,  CHICAGO 


Copyrighted  1912 
by 

The  Ralph  Fletcher  Seymour  Co. 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER 
THE  ARK 

"IBSEN  AND  WOMEN" 

By  Ellen  Key. 

“To  My  Friend  the  Revolutionist .” 
“To  shift  the  chessmen  is  no  affair  of 
mine.  To  upset  the  chess-board — there 

you  have  me  absolutely . You 

invoke  a  deluge  to  sweep  the  world. 
With  joy  I  lay  my  torpedo  under  the  ark.” 

Henrik  Ibsen — 

In  my  eighteenth  year,  my  mother 
made  me  happy  with  three  books.  Up¬ 
on  the  covers  I  read: 

“The  Comedy  of  Love.” 

“Brand.” 

“Peer  Gynt.” 

I  knew  that  Ibsen  was  a  new  Nor¬ 
wegian  poet  but  my  knowledge,  like 


3 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


that  of  most  Swedish  readers  in  1868, 
was  limited  to  that  fact.  It  was  then 
with  the  real  joy  of  a  discoverer  that  I 
buried  myself  in  the  new  world  of  poetry 
and  ideas  which  “Brand”  and  “Peer 
Gynt”  revealed  to  me.  In  the  “Comedy 
of  Love,”  however,  I  found  myself  in 
the  sphere  of  my  own  dearest  thoughts. 
That  is  to  say,  five  years  before, “The 
Bailiff’s  Daughter”  had  become  one  of 
my  devotional  books.  It  is  in  this 
splendid  work  of  Camilla  Collett*,  that 
Ibsen,  according  to  his  own  testimony, 
found  part  of  the  metal  which  he  after¬ 
ward,  in  “The  Comedy  of  Love,” 
formed  into  piercing  arrows  and  sing¬ 
ing  strains.  The  delight  with  which 
I  read  and  re-read  “The  Comedy  of 
Love,”  may  best  be  depicted  if  I  men¬ 
tion  that — when  immediately  afterwards 

*The  first  great  Norwegian  feminist  and 
sister  of  Henrik  Wegeland,  the  great  poet  of 
Norway,  in  the  years  1830-40. 


4 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN” 


I  fell  seriously  ill — it  transpired  that  I 
had  unconsciously  committed  to  mem¬ 
ory  almost  the  entire  poem.  My  fever 
fantasies  were  filled  with  its  per¬ 
sonages;  my  pulse  seemed  to  beat  in  the 
rhythm  of  Ibsen’s  verse  and  my  recov¬ 
ery  was  delayed  because  my  brain 
found  no  rest  from  the  sharp  thrusts 
of  these  keen  retorts. 

This  experience  seems  to  be  typical — 
in  an  intensified  degree  certainly — of 
the  spell  which  is  the  most  universal 
form  of  Ibsen’s  power  over  the  soul. 

I  already  understood  that  Camilla 
Collett’s  influence  upon  Ibsen  was 
such  as  happens  only  between  those 
spiritually  related,  and  that  Ibsen, 
through  her  book,  was  confirmed  in  the 
pathos,  the  tragic  conception,  which 
was  his  peculiar  characteristic.  This 
pathos  impressed  me  more  forcibly  in 
“Brand”  and  in  “Peer  Gynt.”  But 
“The  Comedy  of  Love”  had  sprung 


5 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


from  the  same  absolute  demand  for 
entirety  as  the  two  more  powerful 
works.  And  the  sphere  in  which  Ibsen, 
in  this  poem  of  his  youth,  raised  this 
demand  for  completeness,  was  that  in 
which  all  my  innermost  instincts,  the 
aspirations  of  my  soul,  had  prepared  a 
harmony  with  his  exalted  idealism. 

Camilla  Collett  had  given  voice,  in 
the  North,  to  the  heart-sick  lament  of 
women  over  the  social  customs  which 
stifle  the  deepest,  finest  and  strongest 
in  woman’s  being  and  which  violate 
the  law  of  her  erotic  nature. 

“The  Comedy  of  Love”  was  the 
answer  of  a  man  to  this  woman’s  cry; 
of  a  man  who  hated  the  erotic  abuses 
and  customs  quite  as  fervently;  who 
understood  quite  as  deeply  that  it  is 
“Upon  the  ruins  of  the  temple  of 
womanly  love  that  the  husband  most 
often  builds  his  house.”*  It  was  the 

^Camilla  Collett. 


6 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN” 


answer  of  a  man  who  felt  with  the  same 
bitterness  that  the  finest  growths  of 
life  are  trampled  down  by  flat-footed 
conventionalism — that  its  most  delicate 
possibilities  of  happiness  are  crushed 
between  the  hard,  inexorable  hands  of 
society’s  moral  codes. 

Already  in  the  “Comedy  of  Love” 
Ibsen  was  the  able  moralist,  who  with¬ 
out  difficulty  resisted  the  temptation 
to  create  “dreamy  realms  of  beauty,” 
although  he  knew  that  this  was  what  the 
time  craved.  But  he  knew  also  that 
such  new  kingdoms  are  not  attained 
without  man’s  first  possessing  the  cour¬ 
age  to  abide  in  the  kingdom  which  is, — 
the  kingdom  of  reality;  the  courage 
to  test  the  worth  of  the  life-values 
for  which  men  still  strive,  the  views  of 
life  which  they  still  hold  Sacred,  and 
the  bonds  which  still  unite  society; 
the  courage  to  sound  the  depths  of 


7 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


the  conflicts  which  still  rend  the  soul 
and  to  put  all  to  the  proof  in  order  to 
sanction  it  or  to  recognize  it  as  worth¬ 
less.  Ibsen  was  practically  the  first 
of  his  contemporaries  to  have  the 
courage  to  examine  the  threads  of  the 
“torn  web  of  life.”  Thereby  he  be¬ 
came  deeply  and  permanently  convinced 
that  the  value  of  existence  for  the 
individual  and  the  worth  of  the  in¬ 
dividual  for  existence  depend  exclu¬ 
sively  upon  the  completeness  of  the 
passion  with  which  each  surrenders 
himself  to  that  which  is  for  him  the 
highest  value  of  life  and  which  he  recog¬ 
nizes  as  his  ideal. 

Ibsen  showed  himself  in  the  “Comedy 
of  Love,”  above  all,  the  keen  sighted 
moralist,  when  he  began  his  unmasking 
of  society’s  incompleteness  by  laying 
bare  the  instability  of  the  marriage 
institution  which  he  calls  “The  Tragi¬ 
comic  Miracle  of  Harlequin,”  wherein 


8 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN " 


the  whole  world  falsifies.  Honor  lends 
itself  to  falsification  before  the  moral 
and  happiness-giving  values  of  social 
customs  and  laws,  and  also  before  the 
decisions  due  to  our  trend  toward 
ethical  concepts.  In  this  way  have 
men  transformed  the  highest  possi¬ 
bility  of  life’s  happiness  into  a  “secret 
refuge  from  disgust  of  life;”*  and 
further,  through  making  legal  claims 
to  conjugal  ownership,  have  they 
turned  the  innermost  expression  of 
personal  freedom  into  a  lifelong  cap¬ 
tivity.  Ibsen  began,  in  the  “Comedy 
of  Love,”  his  life-long  warfare  against 
that  idealism  for  which  “the  ideal  itself 
is  secondary” — if  only  the  forms  are 
the  old  ones,  called  idealistic  by  church 
and  state. 

It  is  not  likely  that  Ibsen,  even  in 
the  splendid,  seething  temerity  of  his 


*Camilla  Collett  on  Marriage. 


9 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


youth,  overlooked  the  deep-lying  social 
and  psychological  motives  of  this  social 
“ideal.”  But  the  aim  of  the  great 
moralist  is  not  to  depict  the  rise  of 
institutions.  His  aim  is  to  show  their 
actual  effects,  to  point  to  “The  Corpse 
in  the  Cargo”*  without  considering 
that  this  corpse  was  once  living;  to 
establish  his  new  ethical  claims,  in¬ 
different  whether  the  individual  can 
support  them  or  whether  he  must 
break  down  under  their  weight. 

It  was  the  claim  of  personality  for 
which  Ibsen  found  no  place  in  “Felici¬ 
ty’s  Temperance-Union,”  as  he  called 
the  actual  marriage;  and  this  union  he 
therefore  mercilessly  derides  from  the 
time  of  love-betrothal  during  which 
the  aunts  and  friends  “strangle  the 
poetry  of  love”  and  the  lovers  them¬ 
selves  suffer  that  “their  precious  capital 


*A  poem  of  Ibsen’s  has  this  title. 


10 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN” 


be  shared  by  an  hundred  hands,”  up 
to  the  time  of  the  dulled,  calloused 
routine  of  married  life  wherein  they 
do  not  even  remember  the  emotion  of 
their  youthful  love,  yet  bring  a  flock 
of  children  into  the  world  and  gorge 
them  with  conceptions  of  duty  and 
idealistic  beliefs  “for  use  when  the 
time  of  soul-slaughter  begins”  for  this 
new  generation  as  for  its  fathers  and 
mothers. 

When  Ibsen,  in  the  “Comedy  of  Love,” 
for  the  first  time  spoke  out  fully  in  his 
own  way  calling  things  by  their  right 
names,  he  wounded  society  in  its 
blindest  prejudices,  which  it  always 
calls  its  “holiest  feelings.”  The  result 
was  that  persecution  from  which  he 
fled  after  a  fruitless  struggle  to  be 
accepted  in  Norway. 

At  all  prophet,  stones  are  thrown — 
th^y  show  themselves,  then,  true  proph¬ 
ets  by  “their  ability  to  erect  statues 


n 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


of  the  stones.”*  Ibsen  has  erected 
many  such  statues.  Among  these,  it 
seems  to  me,  some  of  the  women  were 
handled  with  especial  partiality. 

Ibsen,  who  aims  at  and  often  reaches 
the  heart  of  things,  has  made  a  dis¬ 
covery  in  regard  to  women,  gained  a 
new  point  of  view,  which  he  afterwards 
so  strongly  emphasized  that  many 
were  led  to  call  Ibsen  a  biased 
glorifier  of  women. 

Nothing  is  less  true.  Ibsen  cordially 
hated  the  feminine  herd — the  throng — 
“which  in  the  general  chorus  follows 
the  beat  of  convention.”  He  has  also 
with  scientific  accuracy  observed  the 
genus  feminum  of  the  zoological  species 
found  in  the  ark  under  which  he  lays 
his  torpedo. 

But  he  has  also  made  other  observa¬ 
tions  and  found  among  certain  women 


♦Hebbel. 


12 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN " 


a  great  trait.  It  is  this  trait  which 
makes  woman  seem  truly  dearer  to  the 
heart  of  the  poet  than  is  man. 

Ibsen  saw  that  she  brings  to  her  one 
great  ideal  a  greater,  more  personal 
devotion  than  does  man;  that  in  her 
domain,  that  of  feeling,  she  evinces  a 
more  passionate  zeal  to  challenge  life’s 
lies,  “to  rip  open  the  machine-made 
seam,”  to  “upset  the  chess-board,  not 
merely  to  shift  the  chessmen;”*  that 
she  stands  more  upright,  more  inflexi¬ 
ble  than  man,  when  the  evil  “spirit  of 
concession”  demands  submission;  that 
she  cannot  so  easily  divide  herself 
between  a  public  and  an  individual 
morale. 

To  be  less  a  creature  of  society,  more 
a  natural  force  than  man — this  is  the 
quality  which  makes  woman,  in  Ibsen’s 
eyes,  a  being  more  vigorous,  full- 


*Ibsen  in  “Ghosts”  and  in  the  poem  quoted. 


13 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


blooded,  better  qualified  for  life,  with 
greater  demands  for  life,  more  desirous 
of  reality,  more  consumed  with  an 
ardent  longing  for  entirety  than  is  man. 

Human  souls  can  be  divided  into 
organic  and  inorganic.  The  latter  can 
be  crystalized  in  many  forms,  cut  into 
numerous  facets,  polished  into  brilliant 
surfaces,  moulded  into  beautiful  statues 
— but  in  their  naturally  or  artificially 
fashioned  shape,  they  keep  their  form, 
they  are  finished;  they  wane  not,  they 
wax  not.  The  organic  beings,  on  the 
contrary,  may  fade,  be  crushed,  may 
send  forth  fresh  shoots  and  blossom 
often  at  most  unexpected  times;  they 
are  to  a  certain  extent  incalculable, 
because  they  are  growing. 

Ibsen  more  frequently  makes  the 
masculine  soul  inorganic,  definitive, 
finished,  determined;  the  feminine  soul, 
on  the  other  hand,  he  more  often  makes 
organic,  growing,  in  evolution. 


14 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN ” 


These  latter  are  the  souls  which 
gradually  find  their  milieu  too  con¬ 
fined,  which  sooner  or  later  must  revolt, 
if  they  wish  to  develop  into  a  greater, 
more  beautiful  humanity,  into  a  richer 
personality. 

The  phenomenon  in  human  life, 
for  which  Ibsen  most  keenly  watches 
and  which  he  loves,  is  exactly  that 
rupture,  that  revolt,  that  struggle  for 
freedom.  The  result  attained  each 
time  interests  him  little  in  itself.  For, 
as  he  said  to  Brandes  in  a  letter 
invaluable  for  an  understanding  of 
Ibsen:  “The  conception  of  liberty  is 
extended  in  its  claims;  the  newly  at¬ 
tained,  higher  conception  of  morality 
has  no  eternity  in  itself.  Yes,  not 
even  the  most  evident  syllogisms  are 
absolute  truths.  For  who  can  affirm 
that,  upon  the  planet  of  Jupiter,  2x2 
do  not  equal  5?” 

But  although  Ibsen  cannot  thus 


15 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


regard  the  conclusions  of  woman  as 
infallible,  yet  he  believes  that  woman, 
struggling  for  the  independence  of  her 
personality,  in  her  sphere — that  of 
love — has  the  highest  possibilities  of 
finding  the  greatest  relative  truths; 
because  the  ideal  longing,  the  dream  to 
encounter  there  “the  wonderful”*  never 
leaves  her  at  peace.  The  man,  who 
may  be  in  all  respects  her  equal  by 
birth,  can  yet  feel  at  harmony  with 
himself  in  the  daily  comfort  of  a 
marriage  in  which  nothing  is  lacking 
except — the  deep,  personal  life-con¬ 
tent  that  unites  souls,  which  either 
never  existed  or  has  withered  away! 
The  woman  of  highly  developed  per¬ 
sonality,  on  the  contrary,  feels  herself 
degraded  in  such  a  marriage. 

Ibsen  has  never,  in  any  drama  in 
which  the  relations  between  a  man  and 


*Nora  in  “Doll’s  House.” 


16 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN " 


a  woman  are  thrown  into  relief,  made 
the  relation  a  truly  happy  one.  The 
reason  is  in  most  cases  that  the  man 
shows  himself  insufficient.  It  is  the 
woman  who  has  wholly  desired,  wholly 
loved,  yes,  often  wholly  sinned.  Almost 
invariably  it  is  the  woman  who  breaks 
out  of  the  cage,  or  the  ark,  or  the  doll¬ 
house.  And  he  believes  that  she,  with¬ 
out  the  barriers,  will  find  her  right  road, 
led  by  a  surer  instinct  than  man.  She, 
less  than  he,  needs  to  submit  to  the 
social  moral  code;  for  her  greater  power 
of  devoting  herself  wholly  endows  her 
with  a  nobler  instinct  and  therewith  the 
right  to  a  greater  ethical  freedom  of 
choice.  And  here  is  perhaps  the  reason 
why  all  of  Ibsen’s  noblest  women  give 
themselves  without  hesitation,  without 
hestitation  take  themselves  back  and 
follow  unswervingly  their  own  course 
when  they  have  found  it,  or  always  find 
it  again,  if  they  stray  from  it. 


17 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


For  Ibsen  there  is  no  higher  moral 
gospel  than  the  assertion  of  the  true 
personality,  no  higher  moral  law  than 
the  devotion  of  the  personality  to  its 
ideal.  For  him,  as  for  Nietzsche,  the 
supreme  proof  of  the  superman  is  the 
power  to  stand  alone;  to  be  able,  in 
every  individual  case,  to  make  his 
own  choice;  in  action  to  write  anew 
his  own  law,  choose  his  own  sacrifices, 
run  his  own  dangers,  win  his  own  free¬ 
dom,  venture  his  own  destruction, 
choose  his  own  happiness. 

It  is  usually  the  man  who,  according 
to  Ibsen,  bends  to  the  traditional  con¬ 
ception  of  right  although  it  be  a  con- 

.  4 

ception  which  is  for  him  untenable. 
It  is  the  man  who  crumbles  his  life 
away  deedless,  in  idle  brooding,  or 
who  is  broken  through  incontinent 
desire  for  power.  But  not  even  these 
men  with  lust  for  power  have  the 
“robust  conscience”*  which  chooses  or 


18 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN” 


adheres  to  a  new  ethical  point  of  view. 
The  men  therefore  often  drag  down  to 
their  own  level  of  incompleteness  and 
indecision  the  women  who  have  sur¬ 
rendered  themselves  to  them;  or  they 
betray  them  at  the  supreme,  critical 
moment  of  life. 

But  the  women  who  have  sinned 
against  the  innermost  law  of  their 
personality,  these  Ibsen  rarely  allows 
to  die  in  their  sin,  but  sooner  or  later 
they  recognize  their  fault  and — some¬ 
times — atone  for  it. 

If  Ibsen  depicts  a  woman  absolutely 
without  will,  then  he  represents  her  as 
hypnotized.!  If  he  paints  a  woman 
absolutely  incapable  of  devotion,  then 
he  gives  her  at  least  energy  enough  to 
deliver  the  world  from  its  most  useless 
burden  by  taking  her  life.!  Ibsen’s 

*See  “The  Master  Builder,”  Solness. 

f“The  Lady  From  The  Sea.” 

JHedda  Gabler. 


19 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


most  remarkable  women  are  all  without 
scruples,  but  this  lack  has  his  full 
sympathy.  For  it  has  a  w^arm  blooded 
aim:  to  win  happiness  for  themselves 
by  assuring  the  happiness — or  the  free¬ 
dom — of  the  man  to  whom  they  have 
consecrated  their  complete  devotion, 
whether  it  be  their  lover,  their  hus¬ 
band  or  their  son.  And  this  hardihood 
which  no  consideration  arrests,  is  found¬ 
ed,  in  the  last  analysis,  upon  the 
courage  to  suffer  the  consequences  of 
their  audacious  intervention  in  their 
own  or  another’s  destiny.  For  Ibsen, 
this  intrepid  woman  is  personified 
anarchy. 

In  the  “Comedy  of  Love”  he  breaks 
out  in  these  words : 

“In  the  ‘still  realm  of  thought’  none 
fears  bars  nor  barriers,  there  no  one 
fears  to  ply  the  spur;  but  in  action ,  we 
keep  close  to  earth,  for  life  is  dear  to 


20 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN ” 


every  man,  and  no  one  dares  the  death 
leap.  Wherefore  drive  with  whip  and 
spur  when  no  golden  stake  rewards 
him  who  tears  himself  from  comfort 
and  security  and  dashes  forth  head¬ 
long,  high  on  his  saddle?  Such  a  chase 
for  love  of  the  chase  belongs  to  the 
noble.” 

In  the  poetry  of  his  more  mature 
years  he  traced  in  his  women,  more 
often  than  in  his  men,  this  sign  of 
nobility: — the  intrepid  courage,  the 
noble  chase  without  any  utilitarian 
consideration.  And  when  Ibsen’s  men 
ignore  or  wound  or  sacrifice  these 
noble  women  whom  destiny  has  placed 
at  their  side,  then  the  poet  looks  down 
with  unutterable  pity  and  contempt 
upon  the  masculine  blindness  or  brutal¬ 
ity,  pusillanimity  or  conscientious 
futility. 

In  most  of  Ibsen’s  works  it  is  the 
woman  who  utters  the  red  reply 


21 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


of  the  drama — the  reply  colored 
not  only  with  the  heavy,  hot  drops 
from  the  heart  of  this  one  woman,  but 
with  the  blood  of  millions  of  hearts 

suffering  the  same  woe. 

*  *  *  * 

Woman  needs,  in  a  still  higher  degree 
than  does  man,  to  be  awakened  by 
Ibsen  to  the  deliverance  of  her  person¬ 
ality.  Just  as  man  she  is  still  contin¬ 
ually  oppressed  by  a  conception  of 
life  which  demands  annihilation  of 
the  ego  and  by  a  society  which  stifles 
it.  But  she  has  been  fettered  in  addi¬ 
tion  by  an  archaic  ideal  of  woman  which 
men  created  after  their  own  desires, 
for  their  own  convenience  and  in 
accordance  with  which  women  fashion¬ 
ed  themselves.  Out  of  this  ideal  was 
engendered  the  conventional  conception 
that  the  spirit  of  sacrifice  in  woman 
was  the  absolutely  essential  condition 
of  happiness  of  man  and  woman,  but 


22 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN” 


that  the  assertion  of  her  personality 
was  essentially  pernicious  to  that  hap¬ 
piness. 

Against  this  ideal  of  woman  many 
voices  were  raised  before  Ibsen.  But 
only  when  a  great  poet  has  incarnated 
a  new  thought  in  living  personages 
does  it  work  in  wider  circles  with  the 
power  and  might  of  a  revelation.  And 
when  Ibsen  created  his  new  ideal  of 
woman  in  the  consciousness  of  the 
time,  it  soon  became  the  ideal,  not 
only  of  woman  but  of  man  also.  In 
this  sense  Ibsen  can  be  called  the 
poet  of  woman,  but  not  in  a  more 
restricted  sense,  for  he  purposed  to 
work  just  as  little  for  the  cause  of 
woman  as  for  any  other  cause.  The 
coming  into  effect  of  the  new  ideal  has 
demanded  desperate  struggles.  But 
gradually  a  race  of  men  and  women 
have  arisen  who,  in  their  married  life, 
as  well  as  in  their  personal  life,  have 


23 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


earnestly  sought  to  realize  the  freedom 
of  the  personality  of  the  woman  as 
well  as  of  the  man.  Women  have 
summoned  ever  more  courage  to  take 
their  place  beside  men,  not  merely  in 
society  but  in  the  home.  And  the 
man,  as  well  as  the  woman,  has  come 
to  understand  how  much  richer  life 
has  become  for  both,  since  devotion 
is  expressed  by  the  woman  who  is  in 
all  spheres  a  personality  who  gives 
herself,  not  a  being  who  abandons 
herself. 

And  since  for  the  first  time,  woman 
has  begun  in  practice  and  in  thought 
to  cherish  the  feeling  for  personality, 
it  will  also  in  the  new  race  bloom  forth 
with  more  splendor  than  has  been 
possible  in  this  period  of  crisis,  whether 
in  man  or  in  woman.  Ibsen  under¬ 
stands  the  weakness  of  woman,  but  he 
understands  also  her  strength;  he  has 
found  it  in  her  heart  and  knows  that 


24 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN ” 


out  of  the  heart  comes  life.  Therefore 
he  shows  how  the  love  of  a  woman  can 
be  the  salvation  of  a  man,  and  how,  on 
the  other  hand,  he  dries  up  for  himself 
life’s  purest  fountain  of  strength,  when 
he  “kills  the  love-life”  in  a  woman.* 
In  the  new  realm,  where  Ibsen  is 
prophet,  he  has  not  given  to  faith  and 
hope  the  same  place  which  they  had  in 
that  empire  whose  sun  is  setting. 
Doubt  and  questioning  (“scepsis”)  are 
for  him  greater  than  faith  and  hope. 
But  for  him  also  love  is  ever  the 
greatest,  and  in  his  great  women 
he  has  glorified  not  only  a  woman’s 
love  but  also,  at  the  same  time,  a  new 
and  greater  mode  of  loving. 

In  almost  every  conflict  of  an  erotic 
nature,  Ibsen  has  underscored  Camilla 
Collett’s  profound  words,  that  “not  the 
man  and  not  the  woman  ought  to 

*“John  Gabriel  Borkman,”  “When  the  Dead 
Awake.” 


25 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


choose,  but  that  there  -  is  only  one 
thing  which  is  pure  enough  to  be  al¬ 
lowed  to  choose — woman’s  love.” 

That  woman’s  love — if  the  word  is 
taken  in  its  largest,  most  compre¬ 
hensive  sense — more  surely  than  any 
other  feeling  divines  the  way  to  the 
greater  happiness  for  the  individual, 
as  well  as  for  the  whole  race,  is  Ibsen’s 
great  belief  regarding  woman.  He  sees 
her  essential  nature  as  erotic  and  matern¬ 
al  devotion.  From  this  devotion,  to 
which  he  pardons  everything,  he  hopes 
also  for  everything.  He  knows  that  con¬ 
tingencies  of  a  thousand  kinds,  some 
of  which  he  has  painted  in  his  profound 
poem,  “Transformations,”  will  always 
obstruct  the  way  of  man’s  chances  of 
happiness;  that  before  the  red  abysses 
of  the  heart,  before  the  obscure,  night- 
enmantled  regions  of  the  soul,  before 
the  white  and  black  magic  of  sympathy 
and  antipathy,  before  the  delusive 


26 


“IBSEN  AND  WOMEN ” 


play  of  the  senses  and  the  blind  en¬ 
counters  of  chance,  woman  also  stands 
powerless.  But  he  not  only  hopes  that 
woman,  through  the  explosive  character 
of  her  nature,  will  serve  as  the  best 
torpedo  for  the  old  ark,  he  believes 
also  that  she  will  succeed  in  renewing 
the  blood  of  humanity  by  means  of  new 
life-values,  new  ethical  motives,  a  new 
idealism,  a  new  faith.  But  this  can 
happen  only  if  she  develop  her  own 
individuality;  which  implies  that  she 
maintain  the  deep,  essential  character¬ 
istics  which  distinguish  her  from  man. 

Then  will  all  the  dream  beauty,  the 
depth  of  presentiment  in  the  soul-life 
of  the  modern  woman  be  able  to  form 
the  future  and  assume  shape  in  the 
whole  life  of  man,  above  all  in  the 
erotic  union,  so  that  this  will  maintain 
its  entire  strength  and  soundness 
through  its  own  content,  and  pre¬ 
serve  an  ever  increasing  freedom  and 


27 


THE  TORPEDO  UNDER  THE  ARK 


delicacy  in  all  its  forms  of  expression. 

From  such  a  union  Ibsen  expects 
that  there  will  be  born  and  reared  the 
new  race,  whose  blood  will  swell  with 
the  passion  for  entirety  and  with  the 
energy  of  action,  when  it  directs  its 
course  to  that  “Third  Empire”*,  the 
realm  of  beauty,  which  by  the  poet 
himself  was  seen  only  as  an  azure 
island  at  the  farthest  confines  of  a 
storm-swept  world-sea. 


*“Emperor  and  Galilean.” 


28 


